It’s Mother’s Day, that passive/aggressive holiday, as Sharon Brody once called it, though I’ve made my peace with it. Our main plan was to use it as an excuse to get take-out for dinner, but our son is out of town for the day so we moved that to tomorrow.  After spending much of the day trying and failing to pollinate our avocado tree by hand–tomorrow is another day–my husband and I decided to watch a romantic comedy, Down With Love, starring Renee Zellweger and Ewen McGregor.

I loved the movie!

It’s set in 1962, when the Mad Men era starts bumping up against the women’s movement. The protagonists represent either side and predictably segue from spite to sparks, except not exactly, because there are more than a few twists, some of them after the romantic situation seems to be resolved. It’s filmed in a very stylized way, yet the characters come across as real people rather than stereotypes. It also has more than a few LOL moments.

I really, really dislike finding myself sitting in front of the TV with two or three other people, even people I like very much, going through screen after screen of choices looking for something to watch, a situation which often ends by deciding not to watch anything, so I try to keep a short list of pre-vetted movies to use to preclude that activity, which sometimes works. I got this one from the Atlantic article Unexpected Movie Masterpieces to Watch in Quarantine, as well as another we watched previously, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang with Robert Downey Jr, which was also quirky, hard to characterize with one genre, and fun.

Shorter fun things to watch during quarantine are covid-related parodies on youtube, though there are So Many this quickly gets either old or addictive, depending on your susceptibility to Internet wiles. I listened to a few today and became something of a critic; I will not tolerate lyrics that don’t scan. My two favorites, Coronavirus Rhapsody by Raúl Irabién and Dana Jay Bein and A Spoonful of Clorox by Randy Rainbow, both scan, I assure you.

Meanwhile we are opening up a little in California. We can go to the florist, which I am not racing to do, and get a colonoscopy, which I am actively avoiding. At least it’s progress? Talking to our son in NJ today, we were struck by how much more serious the mood is there, even to someone (our son) who is relatively unaffected, well, except that his entire career is on hold for two years. Even so, he would strongly oppose relaxation of the rules any time soon.

For your final entertainment this post, a representative sign from Pleasure Point.